Excel Skills for Specialists

What are the key Excel skills for specialists in your profession? Are there specific functions or features that you use all the time? If someone wanted to improve their Excel skills to prepare for a job in your area, what would you tell them?

Excel Skills for Specialists

Someone asked me if there was a site that listed Excel skills required for different professions, or specialization areas. For example, what Excel skills do you need as an engineer, a research scientist, an accountant, or an investment analyst?

I didn’t know of an all-in-one list, and Google didn’t help me find one either. It’s a good place to get started though!

Basic Excel Skills

Before you worry about specialized Excel skills, be sure that you have the basic Excel skills mastered. That link takes you to a list on this blog, and there’s good advice in the comments too.

Excel Specialization Tips

Since I couldn’t find an all-in-one list, let’s start one. Here are a few articles that focus on Excel specializations. They look helpful, at a first glance, but I haven’t researched them thoroughly, or clicked all the links on them.

This is a short list of what I looked for, before including an article with Excel skills for specialists:

not just a list of function names – examples, Excel tips and career advice too

don’t have 47 pop-ups or auto-playing videos

free info, not just a promo for paid courses

If there are any other good articles that you know of, please mention them in the comments, and I’ll take a look.

Create Your Own List of Skills

Here’s another way to figure out which specialized Excel skills you need – look at the lesson outlines for Excel courses, or the table of contents for Excel books.

Look for Excel courses on Coursera, Udemy, and other websites. The lesson outlines are usually available, and quite detailed. For example, take a look at the syllabus for Coursera’s Mastering Data Analysis in Excel course. Click the View Full Syllabus button, then click the Expand link in each lesson.

On Amazon, search for books in a specialized area, such as Excel for Engineer and Scientists. Click on a book that looks interesting, then use the “Look Inside” feature to see the table of contents.

Make notes about the topics that are covered, and the functions they’ll teach. Then, find websites where you can learn more about those Excel skills for specialists, on your own.